The Evening Skate: Caps Learn the Hard Way

In the final moments of Versus post-game show Wednesday night, former defenseman and Stanley Cup champion Brian Engblom spoke the words that are the most fitting epitaph for the 2009-10 Washington Capitals when he said, “A long time ago I learned you have to be able to play more than one way. Someone’s always got the antidote.”

And in the final moments of a segment of the NHL Network’s “On The Fly” program, host Dan Pollard asked rhetorically, “Does anyone have R.J. Umberger’s phone number?” It was Columbus forward Umberger who ignited a small controversy in March by saying the Washington Capitals play “the wrong way” and would be eliminated by a defensive-oriented team.

All that came to pass Wednesday night in 2-1 Game 7 upset victory by the eighth seeded-Canadiens over the President’s Trophy winning Capitals (Dave Caldwell’s Times story here).

The Caps only knew one way to win, through their great individual talents, and the Canadiens had the antidote. It started with better goaltending, of course, and Jaro Halak’s play in Games 5, 6 and 7 deserves a place in Stanley Cup lore. He stopped 131 of 134 shots taken by the best offensive team in the world.

It continued with better defense, and Jacques Martin adroitly deployed Hal Gill and Josh Gorges especially to shut down the Caps big guns, even splitting them up on the road so that he could always get one on the ice when Bruce Boudreau put out Alexander Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom. In contrast, Mike Green, the Caps high scoring Norris Trophy candidate, struggled all series to score and took a silly Game 7 penalty that resulted in Montreal’s first goal.

Canadiens superiority on special teams also neutralized Washington. The Habs penalty kill worked 32 of 33 times, their power play scored 6 goals in 30 chances. Gill was exceptional on the penalty kill as a shot blocker — as were all the Canadiens — and Boudreau couldn’t figure out that Ovechkin needed to be stationed on the other side of the ice on the power play, away from Gill, so the large, fearless Canadiens defenseman wouldn’t be in Ovie’s path to the net.

Boudreau’s one-dimensional approach to the series also cost him when he stayed far too long with an ineffective Alexander Semin. The coach could have demoted the Semin off the top two lines, or even sit him in the press box in favor of the less skillful, but gritty Scott Walker, the only guy on his roster with a Cup ring and a healthy scratch until Game 7.

So the Caps didn’t make adjustments, nor could they elevate their game, which the playoffs require — especially when faced with adversity. Boudreau was unhappy, for example, that Ovechkin’s third period goal was waved off on a goalie interference call against Mike Knuble. Knuble did make contact with Halak in the crease and this close call could have gone either way….

…but Boudreau is also right when he admitted, “It feels like you’re whining” to question the call. Every team is victimized by a close call, even a bad call, on occasion; it’s how teams respond to it that matters most. The Caps didn’t really respond.

The bigger issue is that this was supposedly the best team in hockey. If they were, why were they even in a Game 7 losing by a goal to a team that finished 33 points behind them?

The Caps had other chances to tie the game, none better than Backstrom’s with two minutes remaining, only to be foiled by Gorges diving deflection (video), a play symbolic of the extra gear the Canadiens found that the Caps never did. Sean Gordon in The Globe and Mail summarized this exemplary team effort, writing, “They dove in front of pucks, they jumped up to swarm rushes, they stepped in to close off passing lanes, and where they failed, their magnificent netminder bailed them out.”

It’s funny how teams so often manage to live up to their identities. The Canadiens are perceived as hockey’s royal franchise and seem to regularly find new glorious chapters to write in their unmatched history. In reality, this version of the Habs bears little resemblance to the legendary teams of earlier eras although, to be fair, this version hasn’t finished writing its latest chapter.

And the Capitals — at the outset an N.H.L.s laughing stock, then intermittently a contender in the days of Rod Langway and Mike Gartner, and later during the Peter Bondra-Ollie Kolzig period before the ill-fated Jaromir Jagr experiment — are considered perennial failures, never able to fulfill whatever dreams they have or their fans have for them.

“It doesn’t matter who they have on their team. When it really, really counts, they just don’t get it done.” Caps fan Rob Darnell told Zach Berman of The Washington Post after Game 7. “We always felt like there was some kind of curse about the team.

“The Caps always got beat by Pittsburgh. Then, they got Jagr, and they couldn’t make the playoffs. So, they have a knack for being the best team — or whatever, making the playoffs — going to the end, and just never get it done.”

The Caps have too much talent to believe they will never get it done. But this defeat should teach them and their fans that winning the Stanley Cup requires much more than just one kind of talent, one way of playing, no matter how exciting it is.

Skating Around: The second round begins tonight with the Red Wings visiting everyone’s favorite underachieving whipping-boy franchise, the Sharks. Here’s a good look at the matchup from MLive blogger George Malik.

Devils principle owner Jeff Vanderbeek, disappointed by his team’s early playoff exit, told Tom Gulitti of The Bergen Record, he will sit down with team president and general manager Lou Lamoriello in the next three weeks to evaluate the club’s direction. “We’re going to continue to be very hard on ourselves and continue to ask thousands of questions to find out what the answer is so that it doesn’t happen again,” Vanderbeek said. He acknowledged the team lost money this season, having only three playoff home dates.

Earlier this week, Ken Belson of The Times reported the Devils were still not profitable when he examined the Devils improved financial picture since moving to Newark.

The N.H.L.P.A. announced today it was re-naming its most outstanding player award in honor of Ted Lindsay, former Red Wings captain and Hockey Hall of Famer who spearheaded the first drive to unionize players in the 1950s. The players select this award winner, which was previously named after former Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, a hockey fan and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ted Lindsay, now will never be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize…

…but every hockey fan should know about the contributions and sacrifice Lindsay and other N.H.L.ers at the time (Doug Harvey, Bill Gadsby, Fern Flaman, Gus Mortson and Jim Thomson among them) made to get their fellow players respect, some measure of legal rights and benefits.

During the past year or so, Jaromir Jagr has been rumored to be leaving the K.H.L. and returning to the N.H.L., often linked to the Oilers. But Jim Matheson writes in the Edmonton Journal that both Omsk general manager Anatoli Bardin and Czech national team coach Vladimir Ruzicka believe Jagr is close to deciding to remain in Omsk. Jagr made $8 million in each of the last two seasons.

David Shoalts in The Globe and Mail reviews some of the other great first round upsets in Stanley Cup play since 1971 to put the Canadiens triumph in some sort of historical perspective. Before ’71, the Black Hawks (which is how they spelled it back then, two words) upset of the Canadiens has to rank among the big ones. The Habs had won the Cup five times in a row and finished 17 points ahead of the Hawks in the 70-game season. Chicago knocked off Montreal in six games, winning twice at the Forum. They eventually won the Stanley Cup.

The Flyers-Bruins second round matchup will be their first meeting since 1978, when the B’s knocked off Philadelphia. “While the Flyers will be coping with the losses of forwards Jeff Carter, Simon Gagne and Ian Laperriere, the Bruins will be buoyed by the return of Savard, who has been cleared to play after suffering a concussion on an elbow from Pittsburgh’s Matt Cooke on March 7,” writes Chuck Gormley in The Camden Courier-Post. That series starts Saturday afternoon.

And finally, the Canadiens and Penguins start Friday and that’s when Montreal will hear the series prediction by Mayor Gérald Tremblay, one of the few who correctly picked the Habs in 7. “Wait 24 hours and I will come back with a Canadiens victory for sure,” he told reporters said today (quoted by David Johnson in The Montreal Gazette). “The question you will come back to me with will surely be: ‘In how many games?’” Reporters then asked if the Stanley Cup parade would proceed along what former Mayor Jean Drapeau used to call “the usual route.” Tremblay replied, “That is certain.”

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